-Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956

Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof I paid the price.

— Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

- John Keats

I hope this grief stays with me. Because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell.

k.b. // andrew garfield [losing his mother]

{Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways/ Unknown/ Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers/ Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life/ Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer (Summer, #3)/ Trista Mateer, Honeybee/ Unknown/ Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body/ Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag/ Tumblr User: @museyuumm}

Book: The Pain of Healing by Samantha Camargo on amazon 💛

I hope this grief stays with me. Because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell.

[k.b. // andrew garfield [losing his mother]

He grew flowers in the darkest parts of me, they died when he left.

Sometimes I wish I would have died too.

Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“In ancient Rome, grief made men twirl in their thin, leather sandals and pirouette until their feet bled; in India, it walked widows onto pyres waiting for fire. The Persians gave the bodies of their deceased beloveds to dogs; the Egyptians buried them with servants. Grief will make you laugh at the funeral, weep over the cereal bowl; it will buzz your feet until they start dancing in the middle of the night. It’s grief that inspires the unlikeliest of bedfellows… Grief will pack your bag, quit your job, buy a white dress. It will make you say yes.”

- The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

......And after a point of time, you just stop!!! You stop expecting peace, you stop trying to be happy, you stop asking for love, you stop looking for friends, you stop expecting.........a future?

-Anjali

I imagine a different life and know it could not exist, know it is incomparable, and consider it anyway.

There is a life in which I finish the chemistry lesson without interruption. I celebrate Christmas, my 12th birthday, and I see my dad again. In another life I meet him as an adult with knowledge and perspective. Maybe we talk, maybe we don’t. He would be alive. Anger fades at the sound of a beating heart. It is enough. I tell him I missed him, he asks what for. He says he’s sorry, and I am too. We laugh or argue and in both I hear his voice, so old and new. I would know him. He knows me. Both chairs are warm, and mirrored eyes are no longer alone. He’s there and it’s real, and he’s not as tall as I remembered.

Empathy stands on a mountain of grief; childhood by the lake. He reanimates. His hair, his eyes, an unharmed body. The words are mine. And he is not him. He exists as I tell him, his life in my hands, and as memory fails his image shifts. I will never remember as much as I wish I could.

In this life I wake up and he is still dead. His eyes are unblinking, his ashes are cold. His voice is faint. I shake her brain to remember again and she is a child and she is scared. I hold her and I am me. Seven years are infinite and small. My dad scatters, fragmented and whole. And where he does not, grief remains.

In a life where anything can be heard, I tell him I love him, and he knows.

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”

— Leo Tolstoy, “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth”

[Sarah Dessen, The Truth About forever/ Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce/ Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son/ Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye/ C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed/ Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere/Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)/ Fredrik Backman, The Deal of Lifetime/ C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed/ Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness]